House Republicans are calling on the Biden administration to halt a Department of Energy program that awarded $200 million last fall to a China-based battery company, pointing to the fact that federal officials have failed to answer basic questions from Congress about the funding process.
Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Wednesday, asking her to "immediately pause any further funding or expenditures" for the grant program, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law spearheaded by President Joe Biden.
The letter comes amid mounting frustration from House Republicans, who say the DOE has stonewalled requests for information about any China-related grants, despite provisions in the infrastructure law that were intended to block funding from going to China’s battery sector. Republicans have warned that China, a dominant player in the solar and battery industries, could benefit financially from the Biden administration's aggressive green energy agenda.
In October, the DOE awarded $200 million to Microvast Holdings, a lithium battery company that operates primarily out of China, the Washington Free Beacon first reported last month. The award is intended to finance a battery separator facility Microvast is building in Tennessee.
"DOE has yet to provide any response to the committee that explains the Department’s vetting process or demonstrates that sufficient guardrails are in place to ensure that companies that receive awards do not transfer funding or technology to China, or are not subject to undue influence by the [Chinese Communist Party]," Lucas wrote in his letter to the DOE.
Lucas requested that the department turn over any "documents and communications referring or relating to project awards" for Microvast and over a dozen other companies that received grants from DOE funded by the infrastructure law.
"DOE’s apparent lack of sufficient guardrails in place to prevent federal funds from ultimately benefiting the CCP raises serious concerns about the Department’s ability to protect U.S. taxpayer dollars from exploitation," wrote Lucas.
While the DOE described Microvast as a "majority U.S.-owned company, traded on NASDAQ" and "headquartered in Stafford, Texas," financial records show the company operates primarily out of China. Microvast told the Securities and Exchange Commission last year that the Chinese government "exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities and may intervene, at any time and with no notice."
The DOE has defended the grant, telling the Free Beacon that Microvast’s proposed facility in Tennessee "will use U.S. sourced raw materials in the proposed facility and equipment manufactured within the U.S. or by U.S. allies."
The funding will also ensure that Microvast "no longer needs to look to China to establish its manufacturing facilities," the DOE told Fox News last month.
The House committee is asking DOE to turn over records related to the award by Feb. 7. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, also requested DOE records related to the funding in December, telling the department that the grant could "undermine the United States’ position in its race against China for technological supremacy."
Did Hunter Biden sell the contents of classified documents found in Joe Biden's garage to the highest bidder?
That's the hunch of New York Post columnist and 'Laptop from Hell' author, Miranda Devine, who threw that out there in a recent column , citing a few things that made her think so.
The Daily Wire has a useful summary :
Stoking concerns about the potential misuse of classified information, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine wrote a column this week about an email dated April 12, 2014, sent to Hunter Biden’s then-business partner with 22 detailed points with “research” about the situation in Ukraine. The business partner, Devon Archer, was sentenced in 2022 to more than a year in prison after being convicted in a fraud scheme in which Hunter Biden was not implicated.
There are a number of reasons why this particular email drew attention. One is how it is written and the attention to detail. The email discusses such matters as Russia’s “destabilization campaign,” United States sanctions, and United Kingdom energy policy. A source told CNN the classified documents found at Biden’s private academic office, among other unclassified papers, contained U.S. intelligence memos and briefing materials on Iran, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Another factor is the timing. One week after the email was sent, Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time, met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Also around that time, Hunter Biden and Archer were hired to sit on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which is repeatedly named in the email.
Devine noted that Hunter typically wrote emails in disjointed, subliterate gibberish, making the smooth policy paper style of these transmitted documents to clients quite unusual.
The thing is, that's not the only time he did it.
Devine didn't mention it, but back in 2021, she wrote a column about some other policy documents that Hunter Biden was transmitting to clients from his laptop, in 2011 -- again, written in that smooth policy-paper style that's not like his normal style.
These look even more like they could have been classified. Here's Devine's 2021 column (emphasis mine):
Hunter Biden boasted he could provide intelligence on the shady Russian oligarch whose Greenwich Village townhouse was raided by the FBI on Tuesday.
The president’s son said he could provide Alcoa, a giant US aluminium firm, with knowledge about the “elite networks” connected to Oleg Deripaska in a proposal from his company Rosemont Seneca, emails on Hunter’s laptop show .
...
Included in the proposal, was a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.”
Hunter wanted to charge Alcoa fees of “$25,000 for phase one of the project [and] $55,000 for refined analysis.”
In a June 8, 2011, email forwarded to Hunter, Cruise’s colleague at Alcoa, Pei Cheng, wrote to Cruise: “I don’t believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000. I think the most valuable piece for us would be the list of Russian elites connected to OD [Deripaska] that would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar, including various Russian Committee Heads, Union leaders or Ministers.”
Hunter Biden in 2011 offered to “provide Alcoa with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL,” reveal documents on the laptop he abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. RUSAL is a Russian aluminum company.
Information that would not otherwise be on the Alcoa client's radar? Does that sound like it could be ... classified?
Draw your own conclusions.
One other thing: I did a search and found no evidence that Hunter and Deripaska knew each other, so it appears the knowledge he was selling came from someone, or something, else -- like a classified document.
The column has some comical back and forth dickering about the price of the documents, with Hunter being perfectly willing to sell it for a cut-rate price to Alcoa.
That Hunter would have so much information about Deripaska, the very guy the FBI chief of counterintelligence was busted the other day for involvement with, is interesting, too.
Back in 2011, before Deripaska was put on the U.S. Treasury's 2018 sanctions list, the FBI was heavily involved with him over a 2009-2011 bid to rescue Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who was captured by Iran and held hostage. Deripaska, according to RT News , citing western news reports, said he was approached by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and asked to bankroll a rescue effort of Levinson, which Deripaska said he spent $20 million doing, apparently to get himself a U.S. visa, until the whole thing was kibboshed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Levinson apparently died waiting.
Let's just say the involvement between Deripaska and the FBI seems to have been intense and gone back for years, which might explain why there were a lot of classified documents around for Joe Biden to mishandle, and maybe even for Hunter to sell.
One wonders about what might be in the Biden papers dating from his days as senator which the University of Delaware says it won't open to the public, much to the dismay of Biden sexual-assault accuser, Tara Reade . Was classified stuff in that stack, too, and was it also rewritten and sold?
The most intriguing exclamation around the exchange with Alcoa, which seemed to reject Hunter's offer based on price considerations, was from an email to Hunter from one of his associates, who noted:
“Not horrible feedback,” wrote Schwerin in the June 10, 2011 email. “Daniel’s guy [sic] missed the point that the price was $25k reduced from $55k.”Hunter Biden had deep connections with oligarchs close to Putin, as I detail in my upcoming book “Laptop From Hell ” (out Nov. 30).
Missed the point? Really? Was the point here that it was a U.S. classified document that that he was peddling at a low, low, price, something that couldn't be obtained otherwise? It's natural to wonder that, since this seems to be about the product even more than the price. It may well have been that Alcoa didn't realize it was purchasing a cribbed classified document and therefore it lowballed its price.
One wonders if this is a game that is going on with a lot of them as former government operatives, and underachieving relatives of high government officials (looking at you, Hunter) join "consulting" firms and hang out shingles. They sell stuff they purloined from their government service, write it up in their own words as their own research for private clients, effectively selling information is unobtainable elsewhere, owing to its privileged secrecy.
Is this how Hunter made his money? The curiously official-sounding emails sent by Hunter to clients may be not just one or two documents, but a full pattern of classified document selling.
Maybe that's why Joe's classified document scandal looks increasingly likely to consume his presidency.
Image: Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0
Team Biden stonewalling Senate Committee on seeing secret docs Biden purloined, and even Dems outraged
Let’s cut to the chase: Did Joe Biden remove classified documents from the National Archives that would incriminate him in the influence peddling racket he and his family were running? That’s the most important question about them, and that’s probably why the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is being stonewalled in their demand to see them. All members of the SSCI have high level security clearances and are considered able to see them. Trish Turner and Allison Pecorin report for ABC News :
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee emerged outraged from a two-hour secure briefing with Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, threatening to grind the chamber's business to a halt if the Biden administration does not provide access to the classified documents seized from the current president and former President Donald Trump .
Senators in both parties have claimed the administration is refusing to let them see the materials, even blocking lawmakers with the highest security clearance, like Senate Intelligence Committee members, while the special counsel probes are ongoing over how Biden and Trump handled the classified records while out of office.
The fact that Democrats are joining Republicans in their outrage would seem to indicate that the party consensus is that Biden needs to go before he torpedoes the 2024 presidential and congressional election and that the Deep State intelligence apparatus wants him gone, too. Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D VA)., whose ties to the intelligence community are profound, is on board:
"I'm very disappointed with the lack of detail and a timeline on when we're going to get a briefing, not on anything dealing with criminality -- that's an appropriate Department of Justice responsibility -- but it is our responsibility to make sure that we, in our role as intelligence oversight, know if there's been any intelligence compromise," Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va, said in a rare rebuke of the administration.
"Every member of the committee, regardless of Democrat or Republican, [was] unanimous in that this position that we are left in ... until somehow a special counsel designates that it's OK for us to get briefed is not going to stand," Warner said. "And all things will be on the table to make sure that doesn't happen," he warned.
Senator Tom Cotton is putting teeth into the demand for the documents:
Tom Cotton says he will slow down confirmation of all of President Joe Biden’s nominees until Congress is allowed to review the classified documents found at the residences of Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The Arkansas Republican senator emerged Wednesday from a classified briefing with Biden officials, including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and accused the administration of “stonewalling” Congress. In response, Cotton said senators will “impose pain on the administration until they provide these documents. And that is coming from both parties.”
“I’m prepared to refuse consent or to fast-track any nominee for any department or agency. And take every step I can on every committee on which I serve to impose consequences on the administration until they provide these documents for the Congress to make our own informed judgment about the risk to national security,” Cotton said.
Cotton’s stance threatens to shut down an already slow-moving Senate.
This is going to get very interesting. If Biden’s operatives continue to stonewall, Democrats will either have to consent to the Senate slowdown or reverse themselves on document release, which would be not just embarrassing but might incriminate them in a coverup when the documents come out, as they surely will, given the momentum among Democrats behind exorcising Biden from office.
Photo credit: YouTube screengrab
T'S NOT JUST THE GLOBALIST NAFTA DEMOCRAT PARTY THAT IS ANTI-AMERICAN, IT'S
THEIR BILLIONAIRE CRONIES FOR OPEN BORDERS WHO ARE JUST AS BAD AS THEY ARE
GREEDY!
The Left's Largest Nonprofits Funneled $39 Million to China in 2021, Filings Show
Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford Foundations funded projects at Chinese universities, government agencies Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Chinese premier Li Keqiang in 2017 (Thomas Peter/AFP via Getty Images) Two of America's largest liberal nonprofits, the Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford Foundations, funneled $39 million to China in 2021—money that in some cases went to Chinese government agencies and universities that conduct military research.
The Gates Foundation, according to its latest IRS disclosure , sent nearly $30 million to Chinese organizations in 2021, including $2.5 million to the communist nation's National Health Commission and $1.4 million to its Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The Ford Foundation, meanwhile, sent $9.3 million to China in 2021— recipients included three public universities that are overseen by the Chinese government's defense industry agency.
Both the Gates and Ford Foundations have long boasted of their work to influence policy and advance technology in China. But the foundations' partnerships with Chinese Communist Party-controlled entities—including some that work with China's military—is raising eyebrows among U.S. lawmakers and China experts, who argue that the CCP's iron grip on the nation means the party is likely to hijack data that advances its interests.
"If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we need to heavily scrutinize every American dollar that goes to CCP-affiliated entities," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), who is set to chair a House select committee tasked with countering China, told the Washington Free Beacon . "Any American foundation contributing to causes that advance CCP-aligned interests in the developing world has serious questions to answer."
Neither the Gates nor Ford Foundations returned requests for comment.
While both foundations appear committed to continue funding Chinese projects, many U.S. researchers are reevaluating their work in the communist nation over fears of aiding China's military. American and German scientists, for example, partnered with researchers at China's Peking University to release a 2020 study on robotic fish. Such robots can be used militarily as underwater unmanned vehicles, Newsweek reported last week, and two of the study's co-authors work with the Chinese research facility tasked with developing hypersonic weapons. The Gates and Ford Foundations combined to send Peking University more than $1.7 million in 2021, tax filings show.
The Gates Foundation labeled most of its grants to Chinese government agencies and universities—including the $2.5 million it sent to China's National Health Commission—as supporting "global health and development public awareness and analysis." The Ford Foundation's Chinese grants cover a wider range of issues, such as climate change, education, and finance. One $150,000 Ford Foundation grant to Beijing Normal University funds research on Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, a CCP tool to subjugate foreign nations through direct infrastructure investment.
While the two foundations' Chinese grants largely differ in purpose, both nonprofits sent funding to public universities that are tied to China's military and national defense industry. The Gates and Ford Foundations, for example, combined in 2021 to give nearly $3.5 million to Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University—universities that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute designates as "high risk" or "very high risk" due to their "high level[s] of defense research" and alleged involvement in foreign cyber attacks. All three universities, according to the institute, are under the supervision of China's State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, which aims to deepen university involvement in the defense sector.
The foundations in 2021 also sent nearly $500,000 to Beijing Normal University, which has worked with the Chinese government to develop military vehicles, according to a 2021 Foundation for Defense of Democracies report . The university in June 2021 also hosted a two-week military training session.
For American Foreign Policy Council fellow Michael Sobolik, the Gates and Ford Foundations' China grants "work directly against America's national security interests."
"The Ford Foundation is funding research for Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, the Party's strategy to overtake America. Meanwhile, Bill Gates funded global health projects inside China while protecting the CCP from accountability," Sobolik told the Free Beacon . "It is simply unacceptable for Americans to aid our adversary, yet this embarrassing behavior remains persistent and pervasive—from professional sports and universities to Wall Street and wealthy foundations."
This is not the first time Gates has faced criticism for partnering with questionable Chinese entities. From November 2018 to March 2019, Microsoft—the tech giant Gates cofounded in 1975—published three papers with researchers at China's National University of Defense Technology, which the Chinese military controls. One of those papers described a new artificial intelligence method to "recreate detailed environmental maps by analyzing human faces, which experts say could have clear applications for surveillance and censorship," Financial Times reported .
Gates also vehemently defended China's response to the coronavirus pandemic, which saw the communist nation cover up the virus when it first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019. For Gates, any criticism of that cover up was "a distraction," and "unfair." "China did a lot of things right at the beginning," the billionaire said during an April 2020 CNN interview .
Beyond the millions of dollars the Gates and Ford Foundations sent to China, the two nonprofits are known for their staunch support of liberal dark money groups. The foundations in 2021 combined to send more than $85 million to left-wing nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that oversees a massive dark money network. That network pumped tens of millions of dollars into the 2020 election to help Democrats, money that came from anonymous liberal megadonors.
Published under: China Democratic Donors Feature Ford Foundation National Security
GOP Wants to Know Why UPenn Saw Surge in Foreign Donations After it Opened Biden Think Tank
Foreign funding to UPenn tripled in the two years after the school teamed up with Biden President Joe Biden (L) and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (R) The House Foreign Affairs Committee is pressing President Joe Biden's secretary of state Antony Blinken for details on the sudden surge in foreign donations to the University of Pennsylvania after the establishment of the Penn Biden Center, where Blinken served as managing director.
The inquiry, led by HFAC chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas), could shed light on the Penn Biden Center’s funding and whether think tank officials had any involvement with the university’s solicitation of foreign donors. Foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania tripled in the two years after the school teamed up with Biden to launch the Penn Biden Center in 2017, with most of that money—$61 million—coming from China, the Washington Free Beacon first reported in 2021.
The donations "raise questions about the center’s ties to—or benefits derived from—that funding, interactions you or others had with the donors, and whether People’s Republic of China (PRC) linked individuals ever entered the center and came within close proximity of classified U.S. intelligence information," McCaul wrote in a letter to Blinken on Tuesday.
The Penn Biden Center has been under scrutiny after federal investigators discovered that classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were being stored at the think tank’s offices in Washington, D.C., as well as at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del.
McCaul asked Blinken to disclose his "involvement in fundraising activities for the Center or the University of Pennsylvania (including donor outreach/engagement), and whether you had knowledge of donations to the university by any PRC persons/sources," as well as a list of all "PRC persons and/or their representatives you met with while employed at the Center."
"Were you involved in meetings/engagements with foreign persons who had made or went on to make donations to the University of Pennsylvania or the Penn Biden Center?" he asked.
McCaul also asked Blinken for information on the classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center and whether any of these records originated from the State Department.
"The Foreign Affairs Committee is concerned about the national security and foreign policy implications of classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement," wrote McCaul.
The University of Pennsylvania told the Free Beacon this month that no foreign donations were earmarked for the Penn Biden Center, and the think tank was financed by general university funds. The Penn Biden Center employed many of Biden’s top foreign policy aides before they joined the administration, including Pentagon policy chief Colin Kahl, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Michael Carpenter, and U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations Jeffrey Prescott.
Since Biden’s inauguration, the University of Pennsylvania has disclosed at least $14 million in donations from China or Hong Kong, the Free Beacon reported last week. The names of these donors have yet to be disclosed by the Department of Education, breaking the precedent of prior administrations which published foreign donor names in a public database.
The Penn Biden Center is also under scrutiny for hosting events for other UPenn groups, including a pro-China-engagement bootcamp for congressional staffers in June, where attendees were able to walk around the D.C. offices unmonitored, the Free Beacon reported on Tuesday.
Published under: Antony Blinken Biden Administration China MIchael McCaul UPENN
VIDEOS
It’s starting to look ‘incredibly suspicious’ for Biden family ‘corruption’: Sen. Johnson
Watters: I guarantee you Satan went to law school
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Ln2aXLqWw
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden , especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality .
Hunter has reportedly sold five paintings worth $75,000 each to an anonymous buyer. Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, has previously boasted he had strong ties to businessmen in Communist China, which has concerned many due to the Biden family’s business ventures abroad.
“We are 95% sure that that artwork went to China,” Comer said. “We don’t know where exactly that went to in China, but we’re going to try to find out when we get subpoena power.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality .
Biden family business dealings with China is a ‘national security issue’: Schweizer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hew-Pm1d-0
Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win tells the story of how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was part owner of a Chinese firm that allegedly sold computers with spyware chips to the U.S. military. The military has never been able to calculate how much sensitive data these computers allowed China to steal.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
Biden Think Tank That Housed Classified Docs Also Hosted Event That Pushed Greater Engagement With China Reuters The Biden think tank at the University of Pennsylvania where the president stashed classified documents didn't just have lax security—it also hosted events in partnership with organizations that promoted closer engagement with China, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The Penn Biden Center hosted a two-day "bootcamp" for congressional staffers in June that encouraged closer ties with China on issues like green energy and academia, according to a source. One of the organizing groups has an advisory board member who served as spokesman for the controversial Chinese tech giant Baidu. The event was held as anonymous donors from China have poured millions into the University of Pennsylvania.
There were no posted security officials at the Penn Biden Center during the June conference—just regular Penn staffers—and attendees were able to walk around the center unmonitored and make use of unused rooms for phone calls and other private work during the conference.
The news raises questions about security at the Penn Biden Center following revelations that classified documents from Joe Biden’s vice presidency had been improperly stored at the think tank in Washington, D.C., and at his home in Wilmington, Del. Biden has pushed back against notions that he mishandled information, describing the Penn Biden Center as a place where his lawyers "set up an office for me—a secure office in the Capitol, when I—the four years after being vice president, I was a professor at Penn."
The events also raise questions about the extent of the Biden team’s involvement in the University of Pennsylvania’s opaquely funded China initiatives, which ramped up in recent years as millions of dollars in Chinese donations poured into the university. The university has denied that the contributions have any connection to the Penn Biden Center, and a spokesman told the Free Beacon that no foreign donations were specifically earmarked for the think tank.
Rebeccah Heinrichs, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the news that outside groups hosted events at the Penn Biden Center while classified documents were stored at the office was 'incredibly alarming."
'The fact that [the documents] were not secured, [were] open and uncared for, and also that you had this other activity going on inside this facility, with individuals that may not have the best interests of the American people at heart, is shocking," said Heinrichs.
'I would like to know more about … who was going in and out of these specific workshops, these discussions, who has been through this facility," Heinrichs added. 'The American people deserve a full accounting of who may have had easy access to these documents."
The University of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment on the event.
The two-day "congressional bootcamp," which was held at the Penn Biden Center in D.C., was co-organized by the university’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China, the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, according to the university's website.
A dozen fellows from the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations spoke at the congressional bootcamp, according to the website. The project is financed by Penn’s China Research and Engagement Fund, which is "designed to stimulate and support activity in China" and engagement with the Penn Wharton China Center but does not disclose its individual donors.
The Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations’s advisory board includes Kaiser Kuo, the former spokesman for Chinese tech giant Baidu, who is now editor at large of a news outlet called SupChina. Members of Congress have been probing SupChina—which recently changed its name to the China Project—for potentially acting as an unregistered agent for China, Semafor reported in October.
The allegations are based on a sworn statement a former SupChina reporter, Shannon Van Sant, filed with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission that month.
In the complaint, Van Sant claimed Kuo said during an editorial meeting that the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong were organized by the U.S. government.
"He said, ‘the United States government is orchestrating the protests in Hong Kong through funding and training provided by the National Endowment for Democracy,"’ she wrote. "Kuo said the U.S. government was responsible for the unrest in Hong Kong, forcing China to impose national security legislation to protect the city."
Van Sant said the outlet’s leadership pushed writers to adopt a pro-Beijing slant and consulted with Chinese Communist Party entities on story ideas. One of SupChina’s funders, financial consultant Clarence Kwan, was also a board member of the China Overseas Exchange Association, a group that works under the Chinese government’s United Front foreign influence department, according to Semafor .
Kuo was not listed as a speaker at the congressional bootcamp, according to a conference schedule obtained by the Free Beacon . Speakers included Penn professor Jacques deLisle, China studies chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Jude Blanchette, and former Obama administration China adviser Ryan Hass.
Panel topics included "China’s Climate and Energy Policies," "Beijing’s Evolving Strategy on Taiwan," and "Public Opinion in China: What Do We Know?" The two-day conference closed with a reception at Bistro Bis, a restaurant at the nearby Kimpton George Hotel.
Did Hunter use classified documents as part of his Ukraine business dealings?
Two Biden scandals are converging: (1) Joe’s illegal possession of classified documents and (2) the contents of that genuine, 100%, all-real Hunter Biden hard drive. The conversation isn’t only pictures of Hunter Biden, drug addict and “international businessman,” suspiciously close to the garage trove of classified documents; it’s also a compelling claim that, on at least one occasion, Hunter Biden sent his business partners an email that has the smell of a reworked classified briefing.
From the moment in October 2020 when the New York Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Miranda Devine has been all over the laptop story. She’s probably one of the few people with the breadth and depth of knowledge that allows her to suggest that one of Hunter Biden’s business emails, written while he was on Burisma’s payroll, seems awfully like a classified briefing, not a typical Hunter scribble.
In an article entitled “There’s no hiding Biden’s fright over classified document scandal ,” Devine notes that many of the documents being discovered, to the extent we know anything about them, are from 2013 through 2016 and include intelligence memos and briefing materials from multiple foreign countries, including Ukraine and China. Devine explains, “That three-year period corresponds to the most frenetic influence-peddling activity overseas by his son Hunter and brother Jim Biden, who made millions of dollars from shady interests in Ukraine, China, Russia and elsewhere.”
However, just because things happen at the same time does not mean they’re related. Devine, thankfully, is too good an analyst to stop with mere temporal correlation. Instead, she assembles other pivotal facts: (1) The laptop reveals Joe’s involvement in Hunter’s business deals; (2) Hunter traveled on Air Force 2 with his Dad to countries that figure in both the stolen documents and Hunter’s deals; (3) during the key time period, Hunter lived in the Delaware mansion in which documents were found and drove the Corvette parked next to documents; and (4) during the same time period, Hunter had unlimited access to Biden’s official White House office.
Image: Hunter Biden . YouTube screen grab.
What really grabs Devine is a “striking email.” The predicate for Devine’s analysis is that most people have a distinctive writing style. Hunter’s consistent writing style is terse, ungrammatical, poorly spelled, and poorly organized. That’s why it sticks out a mile when he suddenly writes an email showing none of those traits:
It was from Hunter to Archer on April 13, 2014, a week before Joe Biden visited Ukraine to meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and refers to “my guys upcoming travels.”
For Hunter, it was an uncharacteristically lengthy email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s “destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk.
“The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU to Crimea. That won’t directly affect Burisma holdings but it will limit future UK exploration and utilization of offshore opportunities in particular,” Hunter wrote.
“It will also result in further destabilization of UK nationally and for whatever govt is in power. And the US will respond with even stronger sanctions. Those sanctions will threaten the tenuous support of the EU which does not have the political will to incur steep energy price increases.”
In point 22, Hunter instructed Archer to buy a “burner phone,” presumably to keep their conversations private. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”
It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.
To check if Hunter copied from a website, I ran through Grammarly’s excellent plagiarism tool, one of the phrase’s Devine reprints, the one beginning “The strategic value is to create….” Grammarly returned only one match, and it was to Devine’s article. Hunter didn’t download his analysis from some online news or analysis site. Those words came from a source to which the ordinary public has no access.
Currently, there’s no proof; only suspicions. But Devine is right to be suspicious when a drug-addled man who writes in a semi-literate, marginally informed, telegraphic style suddenly bursts forth with a highly detailed, deeply knowledgeable, well-organized, and literate analysis of a complex foreign situation.
That the Democrat establishment is now desperate to rid itself of Joe Biden is obvious. Biden’s departure, however, standing alone, isn’t necessarily good for conservatives. The best outcome isn’t just Joe’s removal but also the entire corrupt Democrat establishment’s collapse. Sadly, the Democrats and the Deep State are adept at protecting their interests, even as they pull down everything else around them.
In an article entitled “ There’s no hiding Biden’s fright over classified document scandal ,” Devine notes that many of the documents being discovered, to the extent we know anything about them, are from 2013 through 2016 and include intelligence memos and briefing materials from multiple foreign countries, including Ukraine and China. Devine explains, “That three-year period corresponds to the most frenetic influence-peddling activity overseas by his son Hunter and brother Jim Biden, who made millions of dollars from shady interests in Ukraine, China, Russia and elsewhere.”
Khanna: ‘We Need to Look at’ Chinese Donations to UPenn, if They Were Connected to Penn Biden Center
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On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) stated that there should be an investigation of the donations from China received by the University of Pennsylvania and whether the money came from people tied to the Chinese Communist Party, what the money was for, and whether the money had any ties to the Penn Biden Center where some of the classified documents in President Joe Biden’s possession were found.
Co-host John Roberts asked, [relevant exchange begins around 4:05] “Congressman, what about the potential connections with China here and the tens of millions of dollars that China gave to the University of Pennsylvania at the same time these classified documents were sitting in the Penn Biden Center?”
Khanna responded, “Well, we need to look at that, we need to know what the facts are, who was the money coming from, was it coming from private individuals, was it coming from people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, what was the purpose of the funding, was it connected in any way to the Penn Center? We can’t just have two facts out there without a deeper investigation of all the facts. But if you’re asking should all the facts come out, of course they should.”
Biden Admin Gives National Security Grants to Think Tank Backed by CCP Front Group
The Bush China Foundation supports Chinese leaders and has criticized pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong Neil Bush at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images)
Every year, the State Department gives $100 million in grants to fund public diplomacy programs that "enhance national security." Under President Biden, some of that money has gone to an organization with extensive ties to a Chinese Communist Party front group.
According to federal spending records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon , the State Department in September gave $180,076 to the George H.W. Bush China Foundation, which has partnered with the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, an organization that promotes the interests of Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party. The China-U.S. Exchange Foundation donated $5 million to the Bush China Foundation, a significant portion of its annual revenue, in 2019, Axios reported .
The Bush China Foundation’s ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation make it an odd choice for the government grants, which are meant to advance "U.S. foreign policy goals." The China-United States Exchange Foundation is a top organization in the Chinese government’s United Front system, which the Chinese Communist Party uses to influence foreigners in favor of Beijing’s policies.
American officials have long expressed concern that the China-United States Exchange Foundation is engaged in covert influence operations for Beijing. CIA director William Burns has said he cut ties with the organization because of its connections to Beijing after he took over at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent foreign policy think tank.
The Bush China Foundation has maintained its ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation amid scrutiny of the relationship. Neil Bush, the Bush China Foundation's founder and chair, praised the Chinese think tank’s founder, Tung Chee-hwa, at an event in January 2021. Tung is vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory group for the Chinese Communist Party.
At a Bush China Foundation event with China’s ambassador in July 2021, Bush lamented an "onslaught of anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. over recent years that has led to growing suspicion of China and her motives."
Bush has been an outspoken defender of Beijing’s controversial national security policies. In a 2019 interview with Chinese state television, he criticized pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong upset over a Beijing-backed national security law used to arrest dissenters and shut down news organizations critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
"My first question would be, what freedoms are you seeking that you don’t already enjoy? What setbacks have you incurred," said Bush, who also suggested that "outside forces" were behind the protests.
The Bush China Foundation also received another State Department grant to help develop a "digital mental health network" for American and Chinese "mental health stakeholders."
At an event with the China-United States Exchange Foundation in 2019, Bush said he would "advise my American friends not to meddle in the internal affairs of China."
Bush has extensive business ties to China. He came under fire during his brother’s presidency for signing business deals in China. In 2002, he received $400,000 from a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer. In 2009, he attempted to secure a deal for China’s oil company, Sinopec, to purchase oil from Ghana.
While leading the Bush China Foundation, Bush has organized an annual forum in China, the International Symposium for the Peaceful Use of Space Technology, with officials from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned space and defense contractor that the United States has blacklisted because of its links to China’s military.
An official from the organization attended the symposium in November, where Bush served as honorary chairman. Bush leads the symposium with his partner at the Chinese property developer CIIC. In 2019, Bush and his partner, Wang Tianyi, signed a "strategic cooperation framework agreement" with CASC that called for the "exchange of international space innovation technology."
The State Department declined to comment on the grants. The Bush China Foundation did not return a request for comment.
Published under: CCP China George H.W. Bush State Department
Kevin McCarthy Pledges Subpoenas for 51 Intel Agents in Wake of Hunter Biden ‘Twitter Files’ 71
PAM KEY
11 Dec 2022 0
2:26
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said Saturday on FNC’s “One Nation” that he will bring the 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was Russia collusion to testify at a congressional hearing.
Host Brian Kilmeade asked, “We saw the revelations coming out of Twitter as Elon Musk is unmasking the corruption that existed there and the denials that they testified about. So for you personally you have another move you want to make. Not only do we want to hear from the former executives of Twitter and the other entities, but you have something else you want to say.”
McCarthy said, Yeah, I do. This is egregious what we are finding. They should not have section 230 to start out with, but we also have to go further. What did Facebook and Google do as well because they became an arm of the Democratic Party and an arm of government.”
He continued, “Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong — was Russia collusion — many of them have a security clearance. We are going to bring them before committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public? A Clapper, a Brennan? Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you more information, but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption . Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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